Holland Suggestions (12 page)

“I had some instant in my room,” she said. “I think my heart is beating now.”

“You’ll need some breakfast and a lunch,” Gould said.

“I’m not big on breakfast,” Jill said.

Gould insisted. “The mountains are high and the day is long.”

Over eggs and toast, I asked where we might hike.

“Are there any ghost towns nearby?” Jill asked.

“There is an excellent ghost town called Taylor’s Gulch, about three hours from here. I told Mr. Ryan something about it yesterday—that’s the town where the owner of the mansion keeps a cabin. There is a jeep road up there, but it’s a fairly steep hike; it might take you half a day if you’re not used to the altitude.” He took a pencil from beneath the bar. “I’ll draw you a map. Use it if you want; if not, you’ll have it for another time.”

He explained the landmarks to us as we walked outside. I put the map away in my pocket and hoisted my backpack up on my shoulders. Jill had a smaller bag, which she carried in her hand, and she had brought two cameras, slung around her neck. The weather was beautiful; neither of us wore heavy coats. We splashed along until the muddy street became a dry path that turned upward along the stream’s bank. Jill led the way between the vehicles parked at the stream’s edge, and one at a time we crossed the rope bridge. The sight of the hippie camp brought back my worry about Amy, even though in the warm sunlight her disappearance did not seem nearly so sinister as it had last night. Now I thought it quite possible that she was playing musical beds; she might well be shacked up with someone in the camp. I decided to have a closer look at the camp and its people.

“Would you mind if I stopped here for a minute?” I asked Jill.

“Do you know someone here?”

“I might; I’m not sure.”

She followed me down the path. At the first cabin a man was cutting wood with an ax. He looked up as we approached; his expression was neither friendly nor unfriendly. A partly clad girl came out of the cabin and for a few seconds I thought she was Amy. But she stopped and looked directly at me and I saw that she was not. This girl might have been her sister. She stopped in her tracks, turned around, and went back inside. The man, meanwhile, had put aside his ax and was waiting for us to approach him. He was older than most of the kids you find in these groups; at least older than my preconceived idea of what a hippie was. This man was at least my age, possibly even in his early forties. His shoulder-length hair was streaked with gray and so was his beard. From the neck down he blended perfectly with the others; his plaid shirt was full of patches and so were his jeans. A brute of a Great Dane stood nearby, growling menacingly and following us with his eyes. It was a relief that the dog was chained to a heavy tree.

The man never made a move. He kept his eyes on me and did not offer any greeting, spoken or gestured, until I spoke.

“I’m looking for somebody; a girl who was riding with me. She came up here last night to look around and didn’t come back.”

He shook his head. “She must have changed her mind. I haven’t seen anybody new for three, four days.”

“She was young, looked a lot like the girl I just saw come out of this cabin.”

Again he just stood there, offering nothing.

“If you see her, would you ask her to come down to the inn?”

He nodded and terminated the conversation by turning away and taking up his ax. We climbed out of the hippie camp and were well above the rooftops before Jill said anything. Soon we were above the hippie camp and the town proper; the path climbed steeply for a few hundred yards before leveling off in a slow ascent along the mountain face. It went like that: long and straight for the first hour. At the end of the trail we could still see the town; a few specks and occasional flashes of light against glass far below. We were at the top of a small mountain, with the entire range ahead of us. There were snowcapped peaks that dwarfed this one, and a stiff wind whipped the snow from the peaks into swirling white mists. But that was perhaps two thousand feet higher; here the wind died to a fine spring breeze.

We rested there and shared some talk about ourselves. But each of us wanted to learn about the other, so the talk didn’t go anywhere. From the top the path dipped a bit and the town was lost to view; we began the tough climb that Gould had promised. We tackled it with gusto, but soon I had to stop and rest.

“How come you’re in such great shape?” I asked. I was blowing hard and frankly jealous of her stamina.

“I play tennis every morning. It helps build my wind.”

“And I work out three times a week. So what? None of that seems to matter in this altitude.”

“Oh, I feel it too, but I like it; let’s go on.”

“Oh, please!” I was still gasping. “Sit down, will you?”

She laughed cheerfully and sat beside me on a rock.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “it must be old age.”

“Yes, yes, you must be all of what? thirty-two?”

I didn’t answer her. My eyes had picked up some movement on the trail far behind us and I was scanning the slope for signs of life. I saw a brief flash of light, as though the sun had reflected against metal, but again I could not pinpoint it I looked until my staring became obvious, and when she too began to look I shrugged it off. We climbed higher. Gould’s estimate was almost perfect; it took us all morning to reach Taylor’s Gulch. Jill alone might have done it in three hours, but I stopped once more before we reached the town. The path rose to a plateau, and even before we reached the top we found remnants of what must have once been a boomtown. It was built on three levels, much rougher than Gold Creek but of about the same era. The mountains rose all around us, leaving the town in the bottom of a giant cup. The buildings were badly weatherworn, much worse than those in Gold Creek; many had been completely crushed by the heavy mountain snows. Often only a heap of rotted wood remained to show that a building had once been there.

Like Gold Creek, the town had only one main street, but there the resemblance ended. The street twisted its way up the plateau to the top, crushed and crumbling houses and piles of rotted wood following it up. I tried to imagine what life here was like, but I could not. At the top the street widened and leveled off. This had been the town’s business section, where the saloons and gaming tables and whorehouses were, while the section below probably had been residential. At the head of the plateau another road joined the street, a jeep trail that wound down the opposite side of the same mountain we had just climbed. The land sloped upward on both sides as the plateau blended with the mountains; built into the slope about fifty feet up was the cabin Gould had described to me. It was new and obviously well maintained, with fresh paint all around. The opposite slope was dotted by two semiboarded holes in the rock, dark mines that once had played a major part in the town’s economy.

Jill already had taken several pictures. She mumbled something about needing another lens and a tripod and wanting to shoot the place in the early morning when the sunlight would be pouring in and everything would be pink and wet. It was an impressive performance to someone who had never watched a photographer at work. It impressed me, anyway. Jill worked as if she knew her business, and I felt good about that.

But it was easy to believe in anything up here. It was even easier to brush aside all my thoughts of intrigue; of Robert Holland and the mountain pictures; of Amy; of the man of the black Oldsmobile. There were a lot of things to consider before making any character judgments of the people who had suddenly come into my life. The last of those considerations, I told myself as I watched her, was a beautiful face and a vibrant personality. It seemed to me that I was the star player in some unfolding melodrama, and everyone had a script but me. They had all been waiting, banded together like a pack of vultures, for my arrival, and perhaps nobody was what he seemed to be. In Jill’s case it was easy to check. I made a mental note to call her publisher in New York the next time I got to a telephone.

For now I was content just to watch her. Either her infatuation with Taylor’s Gulch was real or she was a talented actress. Until I knew better I assumed that she was just what she claimed to be. She fitted it so well. She must have taken fifty pictures in thirty minutes. Everything she did looked genuine to me. Soon I forgot about it and moved deeper into the town for a closer look. As I walked through the ruins I felt the same stirrings of old ashes that I had first noticed opening those mountain pictures:
I had been here.
Then a funny thing happened, that experience you read about but never expect to go through yourself. People call it ESP, but I had never had anything faintly resembling ESP and never expected to. I came to a corner where all four buildings were partly standing. Three boulders as large as houses lined the cross-street to my right, making it an effective blind corner, yet I
knew
what was there before I turned it. There were deep ruts in the alley, and two buildings faced each other from opposite sides. One of the buildings was stone, still standing and in good shape; the other had been a saloon. The saloon was a frame building and, like the others, had surrendered to the elements. Inside was the wreckage of a platform that had been a stage, but the roof had caved in and the stage was piled high with rotted timbers. The alley became a trail leading off into the hills.

I saw all these things in my mind in that second before I turned the corner. It was all that way, exactly. The saloon was in worse shape than I expected; the stage had crumbled and only parts of it remained. The alley was badly rutted. The stone building, which might have been a jail, had no roof, but the walls were solid. Part of what had once been a wooden roof hung down into the structure, which was about ten feet square. If there had ever been a floor it had long ago rotted out; grass and weeds grew high inside the building. There were two windows, gaping holes now that all the woodwork was gone.

Then the second strange thing happened, and suddenly and finally I knew that I had been brought here for some real purpose and was getting very close to the end of it. I went to the doorway of the stone building and ran my fingers over the smooth surface. Cut into the stone were the initials RH. It could have been anything, or it could have been Robert Holland. But there was no denying it: I had known they were there; I’d known exactly where to look for them. I went inside. The broken rafters above my head filtered the sunlight and cast a gloom over the inside of the building, but again I knew just where I was going and what I was looking for. I began to examine the walls. There was more graffiti; near the west window someone had written “joan is a lousy lay” in paint. Beneath it was the name Jake Walters. Even in the gloom I could read it easily, for the letters were large and the cutting was deep.

I cannot say I was surprised, but somehow the lack of surprise only heightened the shock. It had a numbing effect. Finally I forced myself to move to the window and touch the lettering. It was a carving to last for the lifetime of the wall. The letters were half filled with dirt, giving them a three-dimensional appearance against the gray whiteness of the stone. Most of the initials around it were dated either 1972 or ’71 and, I guessed, had been made by hippies who had hiked up from the camp. The Jake Walters cutting had been there for a much longer time; whether eight years or eighty I could not guess. My speculation was interrupted by a noise outside, and I saw Jill move past the doorway. “I’m in here,” I called, and she stopped and peered in through one of the windows.

“What are you doing in there?”

“Just looking around. How’s the work going?”

“Lousy. I’m going to have to come back and catch the morning light.”

“You’d have to hike up at midnight to make it.”

“It would make more sense to camp up here for a night. But right now I think we’d better get back.” She looked at her watch. “It’s after one already and it’s a long climb down.”

If I had expected the trip down to be easier, I was wrong. You use a different set of muscles climbing down a mountain trail; by the time we reached bottom I was exhausted. Even from there the hike back to Gold Creek seemed interminable. Dusk had come when we arrived, the kind of dusk that falls over mountain country when the sun slips behind the hills but is still an hour away from dark. Jill had had a good workout too, and she went straight upstairs for a shower. I suggested that we meet later in the lobby for dinner and we set an approximate time of eight o’clock. I sank with a sigh into a large chair in the lobby, closed my eyes, and dozed for a time.

When I woke the windows all around me were dark. Harry Gould was standing behind the register, a smile on his face. “Did you have a good hike?”

“Great. But it made me realize what a tenderfoot I am. The ghost town is fantastic.”

“Isn’t it? I’m afraid it won’t last much longer, though. The winters take a heavy toll up here. And then those hippies are forever carving their stupid initials into things.”

“Yeah, I noticed. Is Max around?”

“He went out climbing and hasn’t come back. Sometimes he stays overnight, and since it’s dark I really don’t expect him back tonight. But I don’t worry about Mr. Max; he’s an expert and he knows the country.”

“Good.” I rubbed my eyes and got up. “Any sign of the girl who came in with me?”

“There’s been nobody here all day. She must have moved on without telling you. Did you say she was a stranger?”

“Yeah, that’s probably it. Thanks.”

I wanted to stay under the shower all night, but fifteen minutes later I stepped out and got into some fresh clothes. Jill was cooking something when I came down, and it turned out to be a simple meal thrown together from her supply bag. She apologized for its shortcomings, but I found it delicious. Gould did not join us; in fact we saw him no more that night. We talked little while we ate; both of us were too tired for words. After dinner we had a short walk around the town, which Jill recommended as a relaxing exercise for stiffening muscles. Then she excused herself and went up to bed.